McColo Briefly Returns, Hands Off Botnet Control

A week ago we discussed the takedown of McColo (and the morality of that action). McColo was reportedly the source of anywhere from 50% to 75% of the world's spam. On Saturday the malware network briefly returned to life in order to hand over command and control channels to a Russian network. "The rogue network provider regained connectivity for about 12 hours on Saturday by making use of a backup arrangement it had with Swedish internet service provider TeliaSonera. During that time, McColo was observed pushing as much as 15MB of data per second to servers located in Russia, according to ... Trend Micro. The brief resurrection allowed miscreants who rely on McColo to update a portion of the massive botnets they use to push spam and malware. Researchers from FireEye saw PCs infected by the Rustock botnet being updated so they'd report to a new server located at abilena.podolsk-mo.ru for instructions. That means the sharp drop in spam levels reported immediately after McColo's demise isn't likely to last."

Comments

Re:So what's YOUR solution?

[girlintraining]

1. I don't have a solution, I'm just considering the ethical aspect.

2. I'd rather deal with spam, malware, and con artists clogging the internet than vigilantes blowing holes in it.

3. As to who's protecting them -- it's not a question of who but what. In this case, economics.

4. It has taken this long because until now people were restrained by ethical considerations prevalent within the community. However, a certain moral flexibility seems to be developing now out of frustration. This can only end badly.

Re:Epic Fail.

[DaveV1.0]

First and foremost, you are not a we. You do not speak for me or anyone other than yourself, so stop using we.

You keep forgetting that McColo had a contract with it's ISP which stated that it would not support spam and malware and that McColo completely ignored that part of the contract.

What about McColo's legal obligations? What about McColo's legal obligations to the upstream providers to uphold the contract between the upstream providers and McColo?

Do you want to know what our legal obligation is? It is to report spammers to their ISPs. And, if that ISP will not do anything about the spammers, it is our legal obligation to report the ISP to the upstream providers.

You are not a troll. You are whiney, immature asshole. Grow the fuck up.